Menticulture Blog

Knowledge and privilege

When I went to university, we still used quills and we paid maids to compile our bibliographies. There were privileges which accompanied being an undergraduate, such as the right to never attend lectures, or to study German philosophy when you were supposed to be studying economics, or to drink absinthe at orgies, or to take free aviation lessons from suffragettes, or to attempt world-record breaking states of inebriation for months on end and completely forget you were enrolled on a course with the cleverest academics who were the leading contemporary thinkers in their field.

I remember with shame, (and an admixture of triumph), being bored to death when my tutor came to a lecture on Thomas Hardy and read aloud a paper he had written for a conference. I had the arrogant young indifference to his standing as an internationally recognised scholar on the subject, and preferred to scoff at his lack of charisma on the day, rather than appreciate the magnitude of the privilege I had in actually hearing him say his own groundbreaking words. It is right that the stupid young should scorn the elderly and be restive against their authority. It is good to kick against the pricks when you're young, because the destiny of everyone who doesn't die is to become a prick against whom the young will kick.

There is something from that ancient privileged world that I do still believe in though: there is a shape to scholarship, which is generalisable: you are responsible for learning stuff yourself. My antiquated mentors were exemplars, not service-providers; they generated expectations, but they did not relieve you of your responsibility to boot-strap yourself into consciousness; you were already privileged by your admission into a system that gave you 3 years of autonomy and independence: why should you be also nannied into making something of yourself? They didn't need to teach me everything they knew, they simply needed to let me know that I should find it out. Hence I'm proud that I was almost 39 before I finally learnt what an oxford comma actually is, and I'm confident that my university masters would be comfortable with the time it took me to find it out, since their job was to encourage me to have an enquiring attitude, rather than to know any one specific thing.

Today, however, that system has been diminished to the extent that it must be subservient to the most prurient, Moloch-worshipping profit-driven coercion, and the mechanism that has achieved this has been under the the mendacious logic of "access", as though access to education is comparable to access to capital. When, o when, o when, o when, will the ideological link between knowledge and privilege be broken? Only when the link between learning and servitude is broken. Learning means thinking for yourself! It takes at least 3 years! if not 21!

Workers and intellectuals

While thinking about Gramsci last week, I was reminded of his emphasis on the solidarity of intellectuals with workers. Who are these intellectuals he talks about? He distinguishes between two different kinds: the "traditional" and the "organic". The former, traditional, intellectuals emerge, seemingly legitimately, from the pre-existing structures of society, and thus appear to have relative autonomy, and somehow represent independence from political interference or interest: clericy, academics, philosophers, theorists - he calls them a "stratum of administrators". The latter, organic, intellectuals are those who are created as part of the emergence of social classes and structures. Gramsci offers the example of capitalist entrepreneurs who, as part of their endeavour, produce a host of technical advisors, organisers, managers and specialists who aid, lubricate and support their entrepreneurial adventures.

As I've said, I read Gramsci as a teacher who is wiser than me, so when troubled by something he suggests, I am forced to grapple with it seriously, rather than gloss over it. Gramsci is famous for his assertion that "all men are philosophers", but this simply entails the further question - what is the function of the intellectual dimension of each person, in the struggle for emancipation and enfranchisement?

The answer may seem to lie in the "traditional" intelligentsia, who have retained their autonomy from the dominant political class, rather than the "organic " intellectuals whose knowledge is infected by coercion into the dominant mode of production. What would be necessary, were this true, would be for the "traditional" intellectuals, the academics and scholars, scientists and theorists, to teach the lowly, "organic" intellectuals. Indeed much contemporary discourse on the threat to the university implies this analysis: rising tuition fees and withdrawal of funding from arts and humanities means that the university system is in danger of being co-opted into subservience to the dominant mode of neoliberal production, being stripped of its historical intellectual autonomy, and directed at instrumental, commercial subjects which will drive capital growth in the economy, because under the new arrangements it will be limited to the richest in society and through privatisation, arcane or unprofitable subjects will go to the wall in favour of crowd-pleasing employment-guaranteeing degrees.

But here's what Gramsci says:

The problem of creating a new stratum of intellectuals consists therefore in the critical elaboration of the intellectual activity that exists in everyone at a certain degree of development, modifying its relationship with the muscular-nervous effort towards a new equilibrium, and ensuring that the muscular-nervous effort itself, in so far as it is an element of a general practical activity, which is perpetually innovating the physical and social world, becomes the foundation of a new and integral conception of the world. The traditional and vulgarised type of the intellectual is given by the man of letters, the philosopher, the artist. Therefore journalists, who claim to be men of letters, philosophers, artists, also regard themselves as the "true" intellectuals. In the modern world, technical education, closely bound to industrial labour even at the most primitive and unqualified level, must form the basis of the new type of intellectual.

Technical education, not education which aims at the production of the man of letters, must inform the new, necessary stratum of intellectuals - and this emphasis inverts the obvious answer outlined above. Far from valuing the autonomy of a layer of intellectuals detached from the dominant mode of production, Gramsci seems to critique intellectual activity that is not engaged with 'muscular-nervous' (i.e. practical) effort. Instead of lumping the "organic" intellectuals in with the dominant classes their efforts serve, he argues that it is this body of intellectuals that need to be fostered - and at that, through development of their practical, instrumental abilities, rather than their elevation into lofty academic "eloquence":

The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organiser, "permanent persuader" and not just a simple orator (but superior at the same time to the abstract mathematical spirit); from technique-as-work one proceeds to technique-as-science and to the humanistic conception of history, without which one remains "specialised" and does not become "directive" (specialised and political).

Or, you might say, all talk, no action. What is it in this critique of the "eloquence" of the traditional intellectual that is not enough? Isn't it the very separation of the academy from the consciousness of the worker that renders it extraneous? If that were all, then it might be enough simply to educate the worker into the concerns of the academy. But that would simply be an attempt to assimilate and thereby eradicate the very consciousness of the worker, in the mold of Matthew Arnold's vision of a universal education system that taught all children ancient Greek so that they could avoid being too anarchic. Actually Gramsci seems to be arguing that progress towards a new emancipatory hegemony requires a class of intellectuals that is not separate from the workers, but embedded in it and thus with its hands on the machines, engaged in the reproduction of the organs of society.

One of the most important characteristics of any group that is developing towards dominance is its struggle to assimilate and to conquer "ideologically" the traditional intellectuals, but this assimilation and conquest is made quicker and more efficacious the more the group in question succeeds in simultaneously elaborating its own organic intellectuals.

The dominant class wishes to colonise and normalise both classes of intellectuals. The problem for the university is that it imagines itself to be separate from the bourgeoisie, but in solidarity with the worker. In fact the reverse is all too true. The university should be invaded by the masses, not because the academy can transform them into lofty thinkers, but so that the workers can put knowledge to their own ends. Resistance must be on those terms, not the protectionism that characterises much of the current defence of the HE sector. As Armin Medosch wrote a couple of days ago,

"[the university system] reproduces internally the class structure of society, where the show is run by non-teaching managers, while a few celebrity professors benefit and the majority are just intellectual wage workers adjusting to different levels of exploitation and alienation. If the students really care for education as a public good they would be well advised not only to defend the status quo but raise maximalist demands, and simultaneously, as already happens in the many occupations and self-teaching experiments, to seek to re-invent university from below, redefine what counts as knowledge and science, and to experiment with new learning and teaching techniques and devices which are more egalitarian and less tainted by the fetishisation of knowledge in the class structure of 'cognitive' informational capitalism."

The university is already private, rich-favoured, neoliberal. The fight should be to seize the opportunity to reform it in the image of the worker, rather than the rich.

Broken university

I have a lot of other stuff to write about, and I will get around to it. In the meantime, I just want to note an observation which occurred to me recently. A moment of realisation.

I've been delving into writing code for collective intelligence, and as I worked through some of the intellectual ideas behind the various algorithms and principles, it occurred to me that universities are exactly the sorts of place where collective intelligence does not emerge.

Despite the fact that universities form a hub and focus for people who value intelligence, and sometimes, even creative thinking, actually the entire tertiary education system is set up to discourage collectivity, and incentivise secrecy and competition.

Universities do not exist for the benefit of learners, they exist for the benefit of researchers. Reward systems recognise research and publication, exercises which demand 'originality' and 'novelty' - which discourage people from sharing their ideas - and scarcely notice pedagogy. Researchers talk more about whose ideas are whose rather than what those ideas are.

The minor army of people who are there because they want to help people to learn are invisible, unrecognised, overlooked, ignored, tolerated. How have we managed to have such broken universities?